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It’s difficult for a bakery to promote its organic breads when it can’t rely on its flour actually being organic.

Yet after nearly 90 years in the bread business, and a decade of working towards making its products fit the organic format, Napa Valley’s The Model Bakery can now claim to be 100 percent pure.

According to Model co-owner Sarah Mitchell, she and her mother /co-proprietor Karen Mitchell had “issues with sourcing reliable ingredients” for their stores on Main Street in St. Helena and in downtown Napa’s Oxbow Public Market. Good stuff all along, just not good enough.

Model's new organic loaves

And apparently, baking good bread requires a lot of bread.

“The problem was, the cost to use organic flour was very high for a small bakery such as ours,” she said. “However, over the last couple of years we have seen our volume quadruple with the new Oxbow location, which has given us more negotiating power to get the right pricing.”

She was able to strike a deal with Central Milling of Utah, which distributes out of a warehouse in Petaluma. Along with the artisan breads – a rotation of more than 17 varieties daily – most of Model’s morning pastries are being made with the new flours.

Besides organic products usually being more expensive already, flour in general is an increasingly costly commodity, Sarah explained. “Many non-organic wheat farmers are switching to corn, because they can make more money selling it for ethanol.”